The Atlantic Unveils 100 Most Influential Americans List

Thanks for the response. Bryan's latest biographer, Michael Kazin, gives me the impression that Bryan simply ignored African-Americans. They weren't on his cognitive map. He accepted his party's dependence on the segregationist vote and bought into the professions of paternalistic concern segregationists made.

Kazin does note the difference between the Bryan of 1896 or 1900 and the Bryan of 1908, who desperate to win was determined not to do anything that might be construed as alienating White voters. Partisanship likewise made him soft on the Klan in his last years. He told his party's convention in 1924 that Catholics and Jews weren't threatened by the Klan and that it took more courage to stand up to the Republicans than to the KKK. Certainly a lamentable statement, but governed more by a blind partisanship than by racial hatred.

I'd say that most national political figures at the turn of the last century had similar views about racial questions. Of course there were regional demagogues whose anti-Black feelings were far stronger, but it looks to me like the most important national politicians simply ignored racial questions.

Their map of the world -- whether nationalist or Jeffersonian Democratic -- just didn't have much room for Blacks (or other outsiders for that matter). Paternalistic notions, fear of change or unpopularity, and the knowledge that there were always people whose attitudes were worse helped keep African-American concerns out of the picture.

So when someone says that McKinley or Bryan or Roosevelt was particularly and extremely racist in a way that other public figures weren't, I begin to sniff out a political agenda. Wilson, who actually did take steps to make the federal government more segregated, may be a different matter. I'm not sure that my assessment is right -- maybe I should be more condemnatory -- but I'm trying to be unbiased in the matter.

Their map of the world -- whether nationalist or Jeffersonian Democratic -- just didn't have much room for Blacks (or other outsiders for that matter). Paternalistic notions, fear of change or unpopularity, and the knowledge that there were always people whose attitudes were worse helped keep African-American concerns out of the picture.

I think it's more a matter of, whom did one consider to be a member of society? America was a European country. The Indians were dealt with by treaty and were separate nations, then and (mostly) now -- they didn't receive citizenship en masse until this century. "Outsiders" were, in fact, just that -- perioikoi, noncitizens de facto, never mind the legalities.

The problem of black citizenship has always been that it was imposed malevolently by a hypocritical Northern political establishment for their own purposes only -- to provide an electoral albatross around the neck of the reconstructing South -- in the full expectation that blacks would remain in the South, and that any racial trouble would be conveniently (to Northerners) confined there, by the operation of race-conscious Northern state and municipal legislation that, e.g., deprived blacks of the right to buy real estate outside certain narrow confines of certain districts of certain cities.

Southerners for the most part -- a few people like Longstreet excepted, who took a legalistic, fatalistic view of Congressional legislation -- rejected the idea of black membership in the political community and society, and they regarded Northern imposition of it on them only, as a calculated insult and premeditated harm to the South. Hence their recalcitrance. Why, given their sense of black apartness, Southern whites didn't give a better reception to Marcus Garvey has been a bit of a mystery to me. I believe it was he who solicited an invitation to speak to a Ku Klux Klan convention in Atlanta. Their points of view were not all that different, and might have closed the circle of the spectrum of opinion, on the opposite side of the circle from those who adhered to Bookerism, and might have claimed the baton of leadership before W. E. B. DuBois and the confrontationists picked it up, with all the consequences that that entailed.

George Washington is pretty much the only president who didn't blame his problems on the previous administration. :D

I think it's more a matter of, whom did one consider to be a member of society? America was a European country. The Indians were dealt with by treaty and were separate nations, then and (mostly) now -- they didn't receive citizenship en masse until this century. "Outsiders" were, in fact, just that -- perioikoi, noncitizens de facto, never mind the legalities.

I suppose so, but there's a difference between true "outsiders" -- say someone on the other side of the earth who's never heard of our country -- and those with whom we've had contact and relations, like indigenous peoples and slaves.

Also, ideologies that claim to be more "inclusive" as regards one's own political community will be judged more harshly if they're particularly oppressive towards those on the periphery of the community. Those that make much of freedom or sovereignty or individualism or equality or democracy will find that their own rhetoric condemns them as hypocritical, once people's attention is drawn to those on the margins.

What I notice in a lot of these arguments is an all-or-nothing attitude. They've condemned us to damnation, therefore we have to damn them. One's tradition is either glorious or infamous without much room in between. We had the real and true thing once, people say, and now we have nothing. If you think of these various conceptions of freedom as partial and limited by their own blind spots, you get a better picture of the controversies.

The problem of black citizenship has always been that it was imposed malevolently by a hypocritical Northern political establishment for their own purposes only -- to provide an electoral albatross around the neck of the reconstructing South -- in the full expectation that blacks would remain in the South, and that any racial trouble would be conveniently (to Northerners) confined there, by the operation of race-conscious Northern state and municipal legislation that, e.g., deprived blacks of the right to buy real estate outside certain narrow confines of certain districts of certain cities.

Southerners for the most part -- a few people like Longstreet excepted, who took a legalistic, fatalistic view of Congressional legislation -- rejected the idea of black membership in the political community and society, and they regarded Northern imposition of it on them only, as a calculated insult and premeditated harm to the South. Hence their recalcitrance.

Is that the problem or is it a rationalization of a stance that people have taken for other reasons -- for example because they don't regard Blacks as a part of the political community? By your own argument above it may not be that this is "the" problem. Would the 19th or early 20th century South really have granted equal rights to the freedmen if it hadn't been for the bad Yankees and carpetbaggers?

The "it's all about us" and the "it's all because they hate us" arguments are familiar. They were probably inevitable in post-Reconstruction America, and there was probably much warrant for Southern distrust of Northern support for equal rights, but a lot of real issues get lost when civil rights for freedmen are seen primarily as a matter of Southern victimization by Northerners.

Also, ideologies that claim to be more "inclusive" as regards one's own political community will be judged more harshly if they're particularly oppressive towards those on the periphery of the community. Those that make much of freedom or sovereignty or individualism or equality or democracy will find that their own rhetoric condemns them as hypocritical, once people's attention is drawn to those on the margins. [Emphasis supplied.]

But that isn't exactly what happens, is it? "People's attention" isn't merely "drawn" -- rather, these issues are thrown up by determined polemicists who are either agenda- or animosity-driven. So it isn't the rhetoric that condemns, it's the polemicist. Who would polemicize on other grounds, with other arguments, if the grounds and arguments you describe weren't available. The polemicist, after all, is a kind of manager, and the argument can't be evaluated properly without evaluating the arguer, his agenda, and his goals. If he's an opportunist or a fanatic, then his arguments can be valued at zero by reasonable people.

An example of what I'm talking about is supplied by Moslem fanatics' diatribal propaganda against the United States. But who really cares what Mohamed Atta thought about American social mores? We know about him.

The Soviets were better at propaganda, at niggling and higgling and keeping the spotlight off their own motives in argument and on the unfortunate target, but in the end the whole world found out about them, too.

[Me] Southerners ...rejected the idea of black membership in the political community and society, and they regarded Northern imposition of it on them only, as a calculated insult and premeditated harm to the South. Hence their recalcitrance.

[You, replying] Is that the problem or is it a rationalization of a stance that people have taken for other reasons -- for example because they don't regard Blacks as a part of the political community?

I thought I stated that very explicitly, that they didn't see blacks as part of "the community", just as black politicians today tend to use a loaded pronunciation of "the community" -- pron. "com-MUNE-a-tee!" -- as a racial codeword of their own, meaning "everyone who isn't white". Southerners in the last century frequently, for example, often referred to blacks not as their countrymen, but in the abstract, as "the African", and used other similar locutions and abstractions that placed slaves and ex-slaves firmly outside the ambit of the citizen-body. Freedmen were a slightly different story, but by and large 19th-century white Southerners saw the slaves with a necessarily pre-anthropological perspective, as a separate society of ontologically and phylogenetically different people.

By your own argument above it may not be that this is "the" problem. Would the 19th or early 20th century South really have granted equal rights to the freedmen if it hadn't been for the bad Yankees and carpetbaggers?

No, probably not, I think I've been on the record with that before -- not that the carpetbaggers had anything to do with it. The Army did, the Freedman's Bureau did, but the carpetbaggers didn't.

The Southerners' problem was, assuming no Lincolnian emancipation, do we keep large and growing numbers of black slaves in our midst to capture the value of their labor, or do we repatriate them if we have to emancipate them eventually? Everyone saw the public danger, but the planters liked to blink it.

Lincoln was thinking along the same lines, viz., repatriation or colonization. His motive in emancipating the slaves, keep in mind, was in removing an economic threat to freesoil yeoman farmers (voters) and removing permanently a political obstacle to his economic allies and sometime clients in commerce and industry.

That slavery was a social problem for the United States nobody contests, and that it wouldn't have disappeared in 1865 without the bloodbath of the Civil War is likewise uncontested. What is contested is whether the violence is justified -- either the body count, or the damage to the social compact wrought by Lincoln's expedient novelties.

The "it's all about us" and the "it's all because they hate us" arguments are familiar.

I'm not making those arguments. The argument I'm making is that it just wasn't about the marquee issues or the propaganda, it was about the business, the money, and the political power.

.....a lot of real issues get lost when civil rights for freedmen are seen primarily as a matter of Southern victimization by Northerners.

One real issue is that whatever freedoms blacks got as a result of the Civil War represent half a loaf, so much having been taken away by the war, and by the empire of political power and money the United States became thereafter, further to be diminished in the 20th century by the novelties of Fabian socialism and the inventions of the civil rights movement.

I still can't vote in an election, unless the political appointees at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division say it's okay. Add that to your compilation of equities. Probably doesn't matter to you -- nobody's looking over your shoulder. Yet.